Signs of the big oil boom all over the place

By Forrest Mims :
July 10, 2013

A rig worker prepares a casing that will be lowered into the well for the hydraulic fracturing process.

Have you recently traveled through the Permian Basin of West Texas or anywhere between South Central Texas and the Gulf Coast? If so, you probably have encountered a good many oil tanker trucks along the highways. You probably also have seen many drilling rigs, some only hundreds of feet from highways.

These are signs of the major oil and gas boom now underway in Texas. More evidence of the boom can be observed far from the drilling sites in the form of big trucks hauling gravel and specialized equipment. Most days hundreds of 18-wheel tractor-trailer rigs loaded with gravel travel from Comal County to drilling sites in the Eagle Ford Shale region across South Texas.

Eagle Ford is the name for shale deposits loaded with oil and gas under a large region of Texas. The name is from the town of Eagle Ford, where the shale deposits were discovered at the surface of the ground. Eagle Ford long ago was incorporated into Dallas.

Elsewhere, the Eagle Ford Shale is considerably deeper. According to the Railroad Commission of Texas (www.rrc.state.tx.us/eagleford/index.php), Eagle Ford Shale best suited for oil and gas production lies within a 250-foot-thick layer 4,000 to 12,000 feet below the surface. The shale is found within a 50-mile wide band that extends some 400 miles from the Rio Grande into East Texas.

The Eagle Ford offers significant advantages over some of the other oil and shale formations. It's especially rich in hydrocarbons, and this makes the shale very brittle.

The brittle nature of Eagle Ford Shale makes it well suited for hydraulic fracturing, which is popularly known as fracking. This technology releases much more oil and gas than conventional drilling methods.

Modern hydraulic fracturing was patented in 1949 and has since been used in more than a million wells around the world.

In the most basic form of fracking, pressurized water is injected into a well and allowed to emerge at various points along the drill pipe within hydrocarbon-bearing rock. The water fractures the rock to release oil and gas.

Modern fracking employs water, sand and various chemicals that greatly enhance the efficiency of the fracturing process.

Combining directional drilling with fracking has enabled drillers to extract far more hydrocarbons than by a simple vertical well. In one form of directional drilling, the bit at the end of a perpendicular well pipe is gradually turned at a right angle so that the well is drilled horizontally hundreds of feet through a layer of shale.

You can learn much more about the economic benefits and environmental concerns of fracking technology at eagle
fordshale.com and www.hydraulicfracturing.com and the links on those sites.

Forrest Mims, an amateur scientist whose research has appeared in leading scientific journals, was named one of the “50 Best Brains in Science” by Discover Magazine. His science is featured at www.forrestmims.org. Email him at forrest.mims@ieee.org.